An Excerpt from Emanuel Derman's Brief Hours and Weeks: My Life as a Capetonian

Friend of WITI and contributor Emanuel Derman wrote the excellent memoir, My Life as a Quant. Now, he winds back the clock from the world of physics and financial markets with a memoir of his youth in Brief Hours and Weeks: My Life as a Capetonian. The hardcover and Kindle editions are available for pre-order at Amazon, for delivery next week.

Following is an excerpt from his book:

My mother has three standards that rule her life: family, stoicism, and eidelkeit.

FAMILY

Family means children. The mother of one of my friends, Mrs K, told my mother: “My husband is more important than my children.” My mother repeated this statement to us incredulously several times. It was incomprehensible to her. And Mrs Wilken, the recently widowed and childless middle-aged Afrikaner lady next door, told my mother across the fence that separated our houses that she had met a man in her church and was in love with him. That, too, was inconceivable to my mother, quite laughable; Mrs Wilken had lost her mind. My mother could better understand the wife of our school Hebrew teacher, who said of her husband and children: He’s just the man I married, but they are my flesh and blood.

STOICISM

She has suffered many losses and does not complain. Besides Shulamit, Ruth, and me, the only blood relatives she has left in the world are in Israel: two younger sisters, Naomi and Yafa, and a younger brother, Yossel. The three of them jointly emigrated from Poland to Palestine in the early 1930s, when she herself came to Cape Town. She does not see them for the next fifteen years.

Her youngest brother, Leibel, and youngest sister, Paia, had been too young to emigrate when their siblings did and stayed behind in Brest Litovsk with their parents, They all perished together. My mother rarely speaks of them.

She has one other photo of twelve-year-old Leibel in a short-sleeved polo. Looking at it today makes me sad – he could be a regular 2024 teenage kid you might see in Riverside Park some afternoon. How to imagine him death-camped?

All correspondence from Poland ceased in 1942. The Germans seized the Brest ghetto on the first day of Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union, and “… Less than a year after the creation of the ghetto, around October 15–18, 1942, most of approximately 20,000 Jewish inhabitants of Brest (Brześć) were murdered.” If she’d been certain her father was dead in 1945, my mother would have named me Nahum.

So, from 1935 on, my mother was in Africa, surrounded by a giant family of scores of in-laws who (I later realize) were less genteel than her blood family, now left behind forever. She is the rock of our immediate family and the larger family, too. She stoically supports my father when he gets anxious or depressed, which he does periodically. She works in the garage with him. She spends ages patiently reassuring my aunt Lizzie, an aunt by marriage, who has severe OCD and worries about having harmed her visiting nieces by feeding them the wrong kind of food. Most everyone in our extended family brings their problems, personal and interpersonal, to my mother, but it’s not reciprocal. She takes hers mainly to my sisters. She likes wise sayings and collects them from the Cape Times “Thought for the Day” feature. She especially likes those of Rabindranath Tagore, partly imagining, I suspect, that the “Rabi” syllables in his name are some secret link to Jewishness. “I cried because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet,” she often likes to say. In the 1960s she sometimes has dreams when she sleeps in the afternoon, dreams in which she wants to wake up but cannot. She tells me that if I ever hear her struggling in her sleep, I should wake her.

This stoicism stands her in good stead when she comes down with ALS in 1970 and suffers through the next nine years.

EIDELKEIT

More than any other quality, my mother cares about eidelkeit, Yiddish for “refinement.” She looks down on vulgarity and commonness, as does my father. The worst thing to say about a non-evil person is that they are prost, Polish Yiddish for vulgar. She also looks down on people with insufficient education. But, to be fair, she recognises that uneducated people can be eidel too. One can be eidel by nature.

We, I deduce from many remarks about others, are eidel. Why, I wonder later, is prostness such a big deal to my immigrant parents, such a demarcator of people? Vulgarity is a big deal to my grown sisters too. Is it the narcissism of small differences among competitive immigrants? Were we really eidel? My sisters believe so, firmly and proudly. My mother, I decide, really was eidel. The rest of us, I’m really not sure.

Everybody loves my mother. She is gracious and reserved and attractive and welcoming. Not only extended family members but also my childhood friends come to her with their troubles. She gives them a cup of tea and several of her famous home-baked cupcakes covered with icing and sprinkled with hundreds and-thousands. What none of them can see is that she herself is wary of people; she holds herself tight. Social life is a strain for her, but that’s the life she has to live among strangers. In my old age, I become a bit like that myself; I don’t like parties or large dinners. There are only a few people with whom I’m comfortable enough to spend a large amount of time.¹

1 I like to think that there are three kinds of people: interesting people, boring people, and people you love.